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44 marriage, and however young they might become widows, they remained widows for life. This was indeed a severe and not very intelligible restraint among a people who were always fighting either with wild beasts or with men nearly as savage. A defeat or a victory, a herd of buffaloes or of wolves, might easily decimate the population of a village, and the number of widows be more than that of wives. However, it was not the men only who were exposed to the chances of war. Women were commonly spectators of their husbands' prowess, and "tradition says that armies already wavering and giving way, have been rallied by women, who, with earnest entreaties and loud shrieks, and bared bosoms, vividly represented the horrors of captivity, which the Germans fear with such extreme dread on behalf of their women, that the strongest tie by which a state can be bound is the being required to give, among the number of hostages, maidens of noble birth."

Whether the life of a German woman were happier in peace than in war, it is difficult to say. When not engaged in fighting or hunting, the men did nothing except eat, drink, and sleep. The management of the Teutonic household and of the land was made over to the women, the old men, and all the weakest members of a family. Their agricultural toil was probably slight enough, since they scratched rather than ploughed the ground, and the crops of wheat and rye were consequently as small as can well be imagined. Their barley crop was doubtless better, since they extracted from that grain a fermented liquor bearing a certain resemblance to wine. Of this beverage Tacitus speaks with seeming contempt, as all dwellers in a wine land are wont to do of beer or ale potations. He adds, to show